… just a few light years from Tatooine, in fact …
a desert planet orbits an unremarkable yellow star. This planet is quiet, with none of the excitement of the worlds made famous by the Star Wars movies. Its climate is a little bit similar to Luke’s home planet. But no humans live there, nor Jawas or Sand People either. No mammals, in fact. No birds, no lizards, no reptiles, no fish. No animals of any sort. Only plants.
Over millions of years, many of the plant species have developed the ability to move slowly about the surface of the planet. A few species also have a modest intelligence.
But only one plant species — which happens to be an enormous cactus species that looks a lot like this …
— has developed eyes!
These Cacti (for they spell their species’ name with a capital letter) can see the world around them! In this respect they are unique on their planet — and, as they have no idea that other planets exist, they take their visual ability to be unique in the universe.
The poets among them extol the importance of vision. It is a gift unlike any other! It allows them to out-compete every other species, of course, but in Cacti literature this is taken for granted. For the dominance of the Cacti over the entire planet is complete, even more total than the human dominion over the Earth. (What possible competition can other species provide when you can see them and they can’t see you?)
More than that, their visual ability has given rise to amazing gifts that no other species in the known universe could ever understand, let alone produce. Paintings, photography, drawings. Sculpture, etching, printing. Film. Television. A dozen others of which humans know nothing. All of it extolled in Cacti literature as the most important, nay the only important, art forms. Imagine being able to appreciate the beauty and splendor of the visual world, and at the same time knowing that no other species in the history of the universe has been as blessed as your own.
All of Cactus culture revolves around vision. The odes in praise of the visual realm, the premier topic of all the great Cacti poets, range from splendiferous to over-the-top. To see, to be aware of the visual, to pay attention to the thing seen; the range of colors; sparkles; rainbows; the beauty of the sunny day and the splendor of the stars at night: their language includes thousands of names for the elements of vision, of things seen and things visually imagined.
The greatest praise among the Cacti is to be called “visionary” or “all-seeing” or one of the dozens of other phrases with similar meanings. To be morally righteous is “to have your eyes in the right place.” To be powerful and important is “to be an eye-baller.” The destitute and down on their luck are both “unsightly” and “unsighted,” while the demented are “out of their right eyes.” In these and a thousand other phrases, all Cacti affirm that vision is the be-all and end-all, the deepest truth of existence. It is the central truth of the self, the foundation upon which is built all goodness, decency, hope, faith, and love.
The most important scientists among the Cacti are optometrists, opticians, and researchers into maintenance of visional health. Philosophy is not called philosophy — love of wisdom — but philoptics. The greatest saints are those who (claim to) see God with their own eyes.
As seedlings, Cacti have no eyes at all! Their eyes develop slowly, and only become fully functional in young adulthood. In this, the youngest Cacti are greatly pitied. They are not-quite-Cacti (by which, of course, they mean the same thing as when we call people “not quite human.”) And as for all the other species on the planet, which cannot see and never will — well, they are mere plants, not Cacti.
Yes, technically, Cacti are plants! Technically, they are the same sort-of-thing as the mere plants, the eyeless ones, the unseeing and unsightly. The Cacti know this! And yet in their language, their culture, in every moment of their lives, they affirm and re-affirm the irrelevance of this historical accident. In possessing eyes, the Cacti are fundamentally different from all other plants, from all other known beings. There is a fundamental, unbridgeable gap separating them from us. “The others are mere plants. We are Cacti. We see, and this is something they can never do nor even imagine.”
Perhaps the greatest of the philopticians was Aristotle-Cactus, who lived more than 2000 years ago. Aristotle-Cactus wrote the following passage (to follow along, you can click the link and scroll down to Chapter V) — and his ideas are taken as gospel truth among the Cacti to this day.
But, it may be, to call Happiness the Chief Good is a mere truism, and what is wanted is some clearer account of its real nature. Now this object may be easily attained, when we have discovered what is the work of Cactus; for as in the case of flute-player, statuary, or artisan of any kind, or, more generally, all who have any work or course of action, their Chief Good and Excellence is thought to reside in their work, so it would seem to be with Cactus, if there is any work belonging to it.
Are we then to suppose, that while carpenter and cobbler have certain works and courses of action, Cactus as Cactus has none, but is left by Nature without a work? or would not one rather hold, that as eye, hand, and foot, and generally each of his members, has manifestly some special work; so too the whole Cactus, as distinct from all these, has some work of its own?
What then can this be? not mere life, because that plainly is shared with Cactus even by plants, and we want what is peculiar to Cactus. We must separate off then the life of mere nourishment and growth. … There remains then a kind of life of the Rational Nature apt to act.
Aristotle-Cactus goes on, in words that are not found in the human Aristotle.
But this rational nature is shared even with some other plants, and again we want what is peculiar to Cactus. The feature of life most peculiar to the Cactus, that which is shared by no other creature in the known universe, is vision.
Aristotle-Cactus concludes that, because vision alone is peculiar to Cacti, it must also be their Chief Good and Highest End. He concludes — how could he not? — that happiness itself can be defined as the activity of the visual aspect of the soul in accordance with reason and virtue.
There can be no happiness without vision. To see and delight in both the seeing and the thing seen is the heart of any joy worthy of the name. To find gladness in any other source is worthy of mere plants, not Cacti.
Another great philoptician was René Descactus. His most famous contribution is summed up in five words: “I see, therefore I am.” This too is taken by all right-thinking (“right-seeing”) members of Cactus society to be self-evident. Without vision, the ability to literally see oneself, there is no self-knowledge. Even rationality itself is best understood as a subspecies of the only truly great thing, vision. Those plants that claim to be rational but lack vision … well, what can one say? One pities their pathetic striving.
Of course, not everything in Cactus world is philopticalism and panegyrics in praise of vision. Some basic physical realities should also be mentioned.
The sunlight on the planet is strong. Clouds are rare. The rotation of the planet keeps one side always facing the sun. So every plant has a choice: which half of the planet to live on. The one side is hot and the sun is constant, 24 hours per day. The other side is frigid and virtually lightless, 24 hours per night.
The dark side, of course, is unpopular among most of the plant species! For millions of years, it was home only to a few mushrooms and similar species that eke out lives in obscurity.
But in recent millenia, Cactus civilization has made the move to the dark side of the planet! The Cacti have perfected several ingenious contraptions to bring modest amounts of light with them. If you visit one of their villages, you will find lighting conditions similar to a typical human night-time suburban streetscape, with light poles every couple hundred feet, and small gathering areas where the light is stronger. The Cacti live out their lives here, in the twilight, though rarely very far from the boundary with the sunny side.
Why not just live on the other side? Because of the sun, of course. It hurts their eyes!
Now as befits eyes that evolved on this particular planet, the eyes of the Cacti are equipped with very thick eyelids. As long as they keep their eyes closed most of the time, there is no problem, even on the brightest days. But to keep one’s eyes closed is to miss out on everything that matters in life!
So the Cacti have chosen to live in a permanent semi-twilight, where their eyes remain pain-free even when open all day. A life where the virtues of the visual can be extolled, and where one can ignore the side effects of doing nothing but looking all day, every day.
Don’t they miss the sunlight? you ask. After all, they are … plants … are they not?
You shut your mouth! “Plants!” Indeed!
Yes, they will admit, as with mere plants, the physical existence of the Cacti requires light. But their villages provide enough light to live on. It is less light than the other plants enjoy, of course. And yes, it must be admitted, the physical condition of the Cacti is less robust than it could be. But they do not compare their physical condition with what it would be if they lived in the sunlight. They compare it only to how other Cacti have lived, for a thousand generations. By that metric, they’re doing just fine.
Are Cacti happy all the time? Of course not. Do other plants seem to be happier, more content with their lot? They do. Is suicide completely unknown among other plant species — present only among the Cacti? It is.
Is the difference, perhaps, due to the difference in exposure to sunlight? A few Cacti are willing to admit that this just possibly may be a critical part of the explanation. But as the great philoptician John Cactus Mill wrote,
It is better to be a Cactus dissatisfied than a plant satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the plant, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.
To live as a mere plant would be intolerable. Far better a melancholy visional world than any sightless existence, no matter how joyful.
I should clarify one point. It is true that most Cacti choose life in the twilight. But not all of them.
First of all, it’s only adults who live in the twilit villages. The seedlings and youngsters, who are as yet without eyes, or whose eyes don’t matter so much to them yet, choose to live on the bright side, soaking up the sun with a vital joy that befits their simple nature. Adult Cacti look back on their youths as a time of unparalleled calm and happiness. But as mature Cacti, their lives filled with seeing all the things of the day, they are too busy for such foolishness. There is no time to simply sit and enjoy the sun. Even if the time could be found, they imagine that they lack the capacity to enjoy that simpler, pre-visional life. Most of them have spent so long in the twilight that direct sunlight is now actively painful.
Nonetheless, some adult Cacti do find themselves living on the bright side of the planet, for a time. These are not the happiest of the Cacti — far from it. These are the sad, the angry, the worried, the insecure. The most damaged, unhappy, miserable among all the Cacti of the world.
Now these Cacti have heard the odes to the eyes. They have absorbed to their very souls the teachings as to the importance of vision, the fact that only the possession of visual acuity places them above the lower plants. But their twilit lives have become a misery.
These Cacti are the visually ill. It is well known that their visual health is not good. They cannot appreciate seeing or the seen — they take no interest in what is before their eyes. To the horror of right-seeing Cacti, the worst off even seek refuge from vision itself! They curse their eyes and keep them closed for hours at a time. They dream of that radiant land where one may sit in peace, doing nothing but absorbing the sunlight: eyes closed, utterly uninterested in seeing.
Those suffering the worst sometimes actually set out on the journey! Driven by an ancient, biological, literally vegetative directive that they do not allow themselves to understand, they travel to the bright side of the planet, in search of the sunniest spot they can find. Once arrived, they plop themselves down in the midst of the desert, soaking up the sun, eyes closed, unmoving for weeks or even months at a time.
What causes the depression, the anxiety, the deep-seated sensation that things are not ok? What could possibly cause an otherwise sensible Cactus to journey away from all decency and civilization, back to that vegetative state fit only for children and plants? Those Cacti who remain in their right eyes have theories. An entire profession has sprung up, calling themselves visiologists. The current visiological state of the art is summarized in a thousand-page manual known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Visual Disorders (DSM). In it one can find classifications of all the visual illnesses: anxiety, depression, PTSD, ADHD, OCD, and a hundred others.
Faced with “simple” depression or anxiety, the favorite prescription of the older visiologists was straightforward. Just open your eyes! You belong in the twilight! Come back and hang out with the rest of us until you feel better! You’re probably imaginging your misery. Just push through it. You’ll be OK. It certainly, certainly, can’t help you to sit in the sun with your eyes closed like that! Only sick Cacti do that! Healthy Cacti live in the twilight, their eyes open. You need to emulate them. Fake it ‘til you make it.
Visiological theory has developed slightly in the last hundred years or so. There is now talk therapy, where Cacti suffering from visual illness are encouraged to talk about their problems. Visualdynamic and visualanalytic theories abound. Eye medications have been found that can double as anti-depressants. In truly desperate cases, electro-ocular therapies are prescribed, with electrical current passed directly across the optical nerves. Sometimes it even works! The desperate sadness of a visually ill Cactus departs for a time. Nobody knows why this works, nor why it so often fails.
But many right-seeing Cacti still only know how to pity and look down on the visually ill. “Look at them sitting there, eyes closed, soaking up the sun like mere seedlings or … or plants! Do they not know how stupid they look? Do they not understand how pathetic they are?”
But the visually ill do know! They do understand. Even as they sit in the sun, soaking up what their bodies so desperately need, they hate themselves. They curse themselves and their lot. Pathetic, they call themselves. Unsightly. Worthless. Blind, empty, pointless. They despise their inability to live up to the standards that all right-seeing Cacti embrace. They experience this time, alone and quiet in the sun, as a time of unsupportable pain. The worry, the shame, the despair! They know only an overwhelming desire for the misery to end.
And slowly, slowly, over a period of weeks or months or even longer … it does end. Our sad, worried, visually ill Cactus starts to feel a bit better. And then better again. And then, finally, good enough to return to society. The Cactus leaves the sunlight behind, returning to its village, its life, its family. Living again in the civilized twilight, seeing all of the hours of its life, as every sane Cactus does.